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I don't see GNU/Linux being contaminated at all...it is a particular distribution...or a popular, yet unecessary, set of software...that may be contaminated. Few distros out there are 100% pure GNU/Linux. As well intentioned as the article may be, I call FUD.

I really wish he'd stop attacking GNOME. Maybe Mark Shuttleworth is in with Microsoft. I have no way to know. However, on my Arch gnome desktop, the only thing that relies on mono is tomboy. Issue the command

pacman -Rs tomboy

and you are free of mono:

bash-3.2# pacman -Qs mono
bash-3.2#

Maybe he needs to find a new distribution. I see from the comments that Fedora is the same as Arch. Tomboy being installed by default is hardly a heavy reliance on mono.

Oh, sorry, just realized that then he wouldn't have anything to get people worked up about, hence no story. So what if he needs to trash a perfectly good free software project in the process.

dinotrac, it's not me who made that claim. See the reply. In fact, I contradicted that claim which was made by a reader.

tuxtom, you said: "I'll start getting scared when they try to rename vi notepad." I hope you realise that software patents are the issue, not assimilation. This is a case of serving Microsoft the 'smoking gun'.

bigg, the checks were not performed by myself. I am also a part-time GNOME user. The issue is just a small minority, not GNOME.

I'm not arguing with what you reported. I'm saying that you should place the blame on the Ubuntu devs, not on GNOME.

At the very least you should report the influence of mono on several of the most popular distributions, and then describe the steps to remove mono completely, as I did above for my chosen distribution. If it can't be removed without completely messing up the system, say that.

FTA:

"These ‘Monopendencies’ could soon turn GNOME into MONOME, making it virtually impossible in due time to use basic applications without Mono somewhere in the dependecies tree."

But that is specific to Ubuntu, and does not apply to many other distros. I have no use for mono, and would never consider developing an app using it, or running an app that has mono for a dependency. However, even using the GNOME desktop, it is trivial to avoid mono completely by issuing a single command.

You would do the free software world a lot more good by explaining what you see to be a problem with mono and then telling them how to avoid it. Presenting this as a problem with GNOME does nobody any good. It's a matter of contributing vs criticizing.